


Afterwards

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Drama, Ishbal | Ishval, Ishval Civil War, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:47:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29266719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Evening in Ishval.Beforeseems like a long-dead dream; andafterseems unthinkable.
Relationships: Maes Hughes/Roy Mustang
Comments: 4
Kudos: 90





	Afterwards

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, Hughes/Roy friends, I come bearing angst!
> 
> And the news that [applications for the Equivalent Exchange Anthology are open](https://equivalentexchangeanthology.tumblr.com/post/642129549412450304/equivalentexchangeanthology-applications-are-now) until February 28, and you should DEFINITELY apply!
> 
> But mostly angst. ♥

“Jeez,” Maes says. His fingertip rubs behind Roy’s ear again, and then he draws it back. He’s probably accompanying it with an overstated scandalized expression. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you to wash behind your ears? There’s _sand_.”

“No,” Roy says. “And there’s sand everywhere.”

“It was rhetorical,” Maes says.

Roy looks at him, and Maes trots out a tired little grin.

Roy knows that he should try harder—try to meet Maes halfway; try to show some gratitude; try to pretend. It’s actually really fucking funny, when he thinks about it: he got exactly what he wanted at a time when he can’t feel anything but numb.

Maes walks his fingers along Roy’s collarbone, following it from Roy’s shoulder down to his sternum. They should get dressed. The Amestrian military has certainly mastered the art of looking the other way, but you never know when you’ll get one of those officers with viciously skewed priorities who mistakes rules for order and commands for principles. There are some of them still clinging so tightly to the idea that right and wrong exist in a place like this—that they’ve _ever_ existed, anywhere—that they’ll write you up for insubordination for an improperly pressed uniform while the smoke from charred corpses spirals behind you in the sky.

Maes doesn’t squint without his glasses. A distant part of Roy that used to be capable of caring wonders whether Maes is actually far-sighted, or if the glasses themselves are just for show—for showmanship, really; for deception. For giving him something to fidget with while the gleams of light off the lenses obscure his eyes.

Roy loves him. Roy has always loved him; Roy supposes that it’s possible he always will. Maes Hughes is the only thing that still makes sense. Maes is the only rational human being left on this godforsaken planet; Maes is the only fragment of this reality that only cuts you when you grasp the edges wrong. Maes is the antidote, even if he burns in the throat sometimes; Maes is the last reprieve.

Maes lets him pretend that a life outside of this will ever exist.

Roy has learned, here, how to be less of himself—how to be so little that the horror washes over him and then away. He has learned to pretend that he can smell anything other than the death, the smoke, the cinders. He has learned to seize onto tiny scraps of anything that isn’t drenched in dread; anything that doesn’t suffocate and drown him simultaneously; anything that lets him forget his own inhumanity for long enough to recognize sensations that belong to a regular world.

There is no more regular world. There is no going back. There is only this waterless drowning in the barren heat. There is only what he has become.

They used to say _When we get home_ , at the beginning. The alchemists came so much later that most of the men had long since choked down lungfuls of the sand instead. They were all desert inside by then, but Roy had felt the impulse. _When we get home_. As if it was a real place; as if it was sacred. As if it had ever been safe. As if Roy hadn’t burned thousands of homes to ashes by now; as if he hadn’t reduced them to streaks of soot and broken timber and scattered white rubble like chunks of a glacier spilled out into the sand.

As if any of them could ever go home. As if anywhere would ever look the same again.

Maes makes the shadows recede a little bit. Roy isn’t too proud to take comfort or too stupid to take solace. He should survive. It’s the least he can do. He should make an effort at it.

Maes’s hands are calloused—dry, yes, but not like the air; not like the wind; not like being too-close and nowhere near close enough to the flames that he sends streaming into the sky. Maes’s hands still feel soft, when he wants them to. He usually does. That’s probably more than Roy deserves.

Maes is the only one who still talks about going home, about what will come after, about what he’s looking forward to. Maes is the only one who can still convince himself that someday it will all seem like a nasty nightmare. That they’ll wake up.

Maes is the smart one. Maes is going to make it. When Maes dresses for the battlefield, he takes off more than he puts on. He removes pieces of himself and shelves them here, out of the wind, away from the blood and the bullets. He gets less sand inside himself that way. Roy is starting to think that that’s the secret.

Sand, everywhere—every breath, every heartbeat. There is sand in Roy’s bone marrow; grit in his blood; his feet fill with it, heavier by the hour, by the moment, by the step. It will make him stumble, one day. One day soon. He will falter, and there will be no saviors, and there will be no gods. On the off-chance that he meets his maker, he has no idea what he’ll say. There’s nothing left in _Sorry_. There’s no response to _Why_. It can’t be changed. It can’t be undone. The universe can’t be reassembled into something habitable anymore.

People say things like _The sky’s the limit,_ as if space isn’t a vacuum; as if the frozen, airless silence wouldn’t kill you long before you got to fly.

The first night, Roy looked up. The desert sky was choked with stars and overflowing, like a mirror of the rolling dunes below—except that every grain of sand was bleeding light and glistening. Roy had been stupid enough to wonder how anything terrible could happen under a sky like this. He’d been stupid enough to think that gut-wrenching beauty could do anything to change what people are.

The best joke of them all is that he never considered himself naïve. He sincerely believed that he was smarter than the average human being; sincerely believed that he had a grip on his life and a handle on his destiny, and that he understood how things worked. That he knew how people were—that he was going to use them _for_ each other, not against each other. That he was going to make them help one another without ever realizing it.

That he was going to make them into something that they weren’t—something better.

That he could change something.

That he could matter.

Comeuppance feels like sand in his throat. Everything does.

Everything except Maes.

Maes’s hands on him, Maes’s skin on his, Maes’s breath against his chest and his thighs and his throat, dredges up the wisps of recollections like so many half-formed dreams. He doubts them, some days, some nights; others he holds them so tightly to himself that he thinks he’ll rip them all to shreds.

They used to laugh. They used to tangle together in closets and corners and bunks; and it was so new and so bright and so thrilling that they’d _laugh_ between the panting, between the bitten lips and whines and whimpers and involuntary groans. They would laugh, and tease, and hold their hands over each other’s mouths and beg for silence, and that would always make the both of them laugh even more.

It happened. He knows that. Maes’s mouth against his ear, his wrists, his jaw, his eyelids—Maes is proof.

It forces Roy to remember that time is linear—that there was a _before_ , and there will have to be an _after_ , even if it doesn’t look the way that any of them wanted. Even if its shape is long and cold and spindly and fragile and grotesque. There is an objective tomorrow. There is a _later on_. There is a chapter heading picked out in the printing press, hovering above the page.

There was a time when he was something other than this. There was a time when he was a person, foremost; there was a time before he was a blowtorch given form and sentience, turned on innocents.

There won’t be any _afterwards_ for that.

But there will be a day when he is, still; but he isn’t _here_. It may find him six feet underneath the shifting sands. It may fling him somewhere else and expect him to be this, to hold it, to carry it, because the only other option is the ground.

When that day comes, what he is and what he has left will have to be enough.

“You’re thinking too loud,” Maes says. Breath on his skin; fingertips chasing his pulse down the side of his neck.

It’s still too hot. When night falls further, all the heat will whisk out of the air as if he’s stolen it himself, with one flick of a hand and one activation of a mess of little lines. Frigid. He’ll almost miss the warmth until the morning comes.

“My apologies,” Roy says. “I’ll ask my internal monologue to whisper.”

Maes’s fingertips wander down to the hollow of Roy’s collarbones. Maes keeps his face very still—just the faintest trace of amusement. Nothing is amusing anymore, which is exactly why he uses this expression so often. It confuses the hell out of people, and that puts him one step ahead.

“You’re going to get through this,” Maes says.

“My internal monologue is whispering,” Roy says. “It’s saying uncharitable things about the likelihood of you being psychic.”

Maes smiles.

And then he doesn’t.

“You have to,” Maes says. “And you will. Because if we don’t get out of here, then they win. And I know you, Roy.” He half-smiles; his eyes gleam; there is sand in Roy’s mouth and in his heart, churning in his guts. “I know that losing is the only thing that you hate more than you hate yourself.”

“It’s funny,” Roy says. “I didn’t take you for a die-hard romantic when we met.”

Maes snorts and shoves at his shoulder before settling down against him again. Most of the time, in the heat of the day, human contact is oppressive. It’s still too warm for this to be comfortable, but Roy’s accepted that. He prefers it, lately. It makes him feel _something_ , even if the _something_ is a stomach-turning stickiness with a dehydrated vertigo chaser.

Maes is picking at a scab on Roy’s jaw. That’s so disgusting that Roy almost cares.

He doesn’t remember where the cut came from. Could have been shaving. Could have been a burn. Could have been a lot of things.

“It’s not your fault,” Maes says. “I am a man of simply too many talents to take in at once. So what’s the first thing?”

Roy blinks at Maes, slowly. He’s been told that he has an expressive face, usually by people who don’t know what he’s hiding.

“When you get to the top,” Maes says. “What’s the first thing that you’re going to change?”

He needs to keep his voice down. No one is too precious to Amestris to lose. Accidents happen. Soldiers don’t come back to camp.

“It is going to be illegal,” Roy says, “for you to wear clothes. You look much better without them.”

“May I have a towel?” Maes says. “You know, if I have to travel. How about a silk robe for winter?”

“I’ll think about it,” Roy says

“Maybe a mink stole,” Maes says. “I’ve always wanted to throw a mink stole over my shoulder and then storm out of a room.”

“That doesn’t have to wait,” Roy says. “You can borrow one from Chris and practice.”

“Perfect,” Maes says. His fingertip traces idle designs under Roy’s collarbone, then drags up across it. Roy can’t tell if they’re meaningless, or if they’re letters. _S.O.S._ , possibly. “Something to look forward to.”

Roy breathes. That’s progress.

“What’s the first thing that you’re going to do,” he says, “when you get home?”

“Me?” Maes says, as if Roy could possibly, by any straining stretch of the imagination, be talking to or with or about anybody else. “Well, _obviously_ , I’m going to kiss my girlfriend.”

Roy’s heart has been bled too dry for bruising, but it does crumble a little bit.

“And then I’m going to hug my girlfriend,” Maes says. “And then I’m going to take a two-hour-long shower. And then I’m going to kiss my girlfriend a whole lot more.”

Roy looks at the ceiling of the tent, which he isn’t sure actually qualifies as a ceiling. He hasn’t been able to come up with a better word for it. There probably is one. The right words for things don’t seem as important anymore. “Poetic.”

“I know,” Maes says. His finger keeps trailing up over Roy’s shoulder. “After that, I’m going to pry the bottle out of your hands, and if you haven’t drunk enough of it yet to make your breath stink, I’m going to kiss you, too. And then make _you_ take a shower. Am I missing anything?”

Roy smiles. Feels… strange. Almost nice. It _feels_ —feels like anything. He’ll take it. “Kissing the postman, at this rate.”

“We’ve been gone a while,” Maes says. “Might be a different postman than when I left. Is he cute?”

“I haven’t decided,” Roy says.

“Doesn’t matter,” Maes says. “Sure. What the hell. I’ll kiss him, too. I’d kiss Bradley if it got me back faster.”

“That’s not funny,” Roy says.

Maes’s grin at full-force used to be blinding. Even now, even from Roy’s cautious peripheral vision, it’s intense. “It’s a little funny.”

“Slip him some tongue for me,” Roy says.

Maes chokes.


End file.
